Page 144 - The Resilient Organization

Case Study: Resilience in Action—Building Reservoirs for Change 131

perhaps not unlike slack in an organization, enabling innovation when
necessary (Cyert & March, 1963). The perspective offers a way in which
the practice of change can be assessed as to its resilience value. The reser-
voirs for resilience may be evaluated, to begin with, by asking: Did a sub-
stantial number of people become mobilized and personally committed,
individually and in teams? Did community members develop ways to be
inventively experimental in their activity, to innovate and to experiment?
Did community members become mindful beyond the focal activity? Did
community members gain personal courage to question the status quo? Did
they apply the lessons they learned in other work tasks?
These questions stem from the understanding of resilience as something
requiring broad contribution from volunteer innovators contributing their
diverse perspectives to the quest rather than relying on a CEO’s privileged
viewpoint alone. While it is not clear that the management innovations
embarked on were the right ones should the environment change, the ben-
efit was the practicing of an experimental process that can be repurposed
to provide future management innovations as needed. Thus resilience in
this case was learning a problem-solving methodology rather than a single
solution.
What is needed is practicing change rather than waiting until change
becomes a necessity. If unrehearsed, the exploration of the new will proba-
bly be unnecessarily difficult and ultimately not very successful: like going
to war without battle training. While many companies spend a lot of intel-
lectual energy in strategizing, they may forgo the practicing of change—
how to implement any eventual strategy. Both are certainly needed, and
resilience is likely to reside in the generative dance between what is known
and what can be done.